Hominid Ecology

From this moment forward I’m going to make a concerted effort to abandon the terms “society” and “culture”, replacing “society” instead with “hominid ecology” (unless I or someone else comes up with a better term that contains the term “ecology” in it). There are a few reasons for such a move. First, as Latour has tirelessly argued in texts like We Have Never Been Modern and The Politics of Nature, modernity is premised on a split between nature and culture where both nature and culture are entirely distinct from one another and are governed by entirely different principles. Nature, it is said, is governed entirely by brute matter (a now outmoded conception of matter) and mechanical causality (an outmoded notion of causality). Culture and society, on the other hand, are governed by norms, beliefs, ideologies, language, signifiers, rituals, and so on. The modernist framework is premised on keeping these two domains entirely separate. When speaking of society or culture, the story goes, we will only speak of mental entities, norms, ideologies, and linguistic entities. We will here only speak of texts. When speaking of nature we will only speak of causes and so-called “material things”.

The problem is that this way of proceeding entirely distorts our understanding of society. We speak as if the glue that holds people together were only beliefs, ideologies, norms, texts, language, signs, etc. Yet as Latour argues in texts like Pandora’s Hope, societies wouldn’t hold together for a single moment were it just these things that held them together. Groups are also held together (and separated) by rivers, mountains, various plants and animals (cf. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel), roads, telephone lines, waste and sewage systems, mediums of communication, microbes, parks, oceans, climate regularities, etc. The problem with the modernist framework is that it renders these things largely invisible, and also renders the organizing and separating power or gravity they exercise invisible. For example, you seldom hear an analysis in the social sciences but especially in the humanities of how the layout of roads alone in a particular city bring certain people together and keeps certain people elsewhere. Instead, those working in the tradition of the early Frankfurt School (and primarily Horkheimer and Adorno), post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Baudrillard), structuralism (Althusser, Levi-Strauss), and psychoanalysis (Zizek), tend to treat the social world as merely a text to be deciphered and power as residing in texts alone. Althusserians can insist that ideologies are material, yet strangely they only ever seem to focus on ideologies imbedded in speech, laws, texts, ignoring the other material things– generally nonhuman –that exert power and that organize lives in particular ways.

read on!

Thinkers like Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad, have gone a long way towards showing us how we can think about society differently as, to use Latour’s term, “collectives of humans and nonhumans”. Following Bennett in Vibrant Matter— and as I also tried to argue in my article “The Ethics of the Event: Deleuze and Ethics Without Arche” in Nun and Smith’s Deleuze and Ethics –this entails that we need to think about the public differently. A public here is no longer something composed of humans alone, but something composed of humans and nonhumans and sometimes just nonhumans (like a coral reef), but never just humans alone. The advantage of attending to these nonhuman things in our hominid ecology is that we open the door to a much wider variety of political strategies that aren’t immediately visible in a modernist framework). Rather than just engaging in critique (which should not abandon), rather than simply debunking or revealing the fetish behind an artifact we took to be “natural”, recognizing the role that nonhumans play in hominid ecosystem opens the possibility of introducing new nonhumans into these ecosystems or getting rid of them as a way of producing change in these systems. Building a rode or transit system can sometimes be a more radical intervention than debunking an ideology. Missionaries and humanitarian workers have known this for decades, but those in the humanities and social sciences seldom seem to listen.

Second, the problem with the modernist schema is that it seems to render the manner in which societies are imbricated with “nature” completely opaque. It’s as if this signifier, “society”, had a force and agency all its own that ineluctably leads us to think that nature is something over there and society is something over here. We then claim that there’s a distribution of labor. This scholar studies “society” and “culture”, while that scholar studies “nature”. Yet as theorists such as Tim Morton have argued in The Ecological Thought, nature is not something outside of society, but rather society is something that is pervaded by “nature” through and through. First, like any dissipative system, societies must draw all sorts of energies from the natural world to sustain themselves. It is astonishing that there has been so little work in the humanities and social sciences on these dependencies… How many social relations might we explained based on fluctuations in these flows through the social system? How much does limitations on calories and material sources of energy like fossil fuels contribute to people not challenging oppressive ecologies? So far we have Negerastani’s obscure work in the Cyclonopedia and perhaps Bataille’s work in The Accursed Share. We need more. On the other hand, the productions of societies never simply remain in “society”, but rather flow throughout the entire world. The division between nature and culture is counter-productive when trying to think the manner in which we are embedded in the world. It is for these reasons that I’ve tried to develop the concept of flat ontology, as well as that of the “wilderness“. The wilderness is not elsewhere, but is rather everywhere. We’re even in the midst of the wilderness in the middle of New York City.

Finally, third, the term “society” is just too monolithic. We tend to think of society as a “thing” that does things through “social forces” without specifying the mediators through which these things are done. The term “ecology”, by contrast, suggests inquiry into how things are actually assembled together (which also entails that the social and political theorist can no longer simply rely on texts to make pronouncements on the world). What are the elements that compose this particular homined ecology? This would require us to discern material-semiotic components or texts, but also buildings, roads, technologies, features of the “natural geography”, the different groups, the different institutions (corporations, businesses, governmental agencies, etc), food sources, energy sources, fences, domestic and wild animal life, microbes, etc. And, above all, we need to know how these things are related together, how they are assembled, what the tendencies of these assemblages are (virtual cartographies), and how these elements interact with one another. It is a massive project that requires a new sort of cartography.

The advantage of the term “hominid ecology” as opposed to “society” is that it both breaks habits of thoughts, assumptions, and draws us towards concrete forms of analysis. It also reminds us that we are not entities distinct from the world, we are not privileged entities, but rather that we are beings amongst all sorts of other beings and that we couldn’t be what we are without all these nonhumans. In a strange way, it seems as if all of Judeo-Christianity and modernity has been designed– or has at least functioned –to repress this amongstness. It is time to begin changing that.

Like this:

32 Responses to “Hominid Ecology”

Another semantic difference, I guess. I prefer not to abandon the terms society and culture, but I love the idea of hominid ecology and will probably use that along with the others. Maybe it’s just my disciplinary bias, but I can’t quite bring myself to give up the concept of culture – problematic though it may be. I would rather reconceptualize it along the lines you, Morton, Latour, Haraway and others are proposing. We’ll see how successful I am. :)

I really appreciate the broader points of this post, to which all I have to say at the moment is “I’m on board!” But I just want to point out that there are in fact a number of people across the social sciences working on these problems as well. As obscure as it still may be, it is happening. In anthropology there’s been an emerging push toward “multispecies ethnography” for a number of years now (I especially recommend the work of Anna Tsing, and the Matsutake Worlds research group she is a part of.)

Probably! :) I see it as my baggage sort of – something I can’t quite drop, but I have a lot of trouble with. I think I remember a discussion about culture as an object – even then you preferred “society” to “culture.” It was another practical issue for me – how would I justify myself going to my dissertation defense saying that cultures are objects? There are a lot of historical reasons in anthropology for avoiding such terminology – I still do, I guess, but I see where you’re coming from, and I don’t worry about it anymore. :)
Oh, and I second the Hornborg connection from Adam – he’s got some fascinating stuff going on!

I’m sorry, but there is something deeply hilarious about “hominid ecology” for “society.” It reminds me of a time when old school homo sapiens inhabited the Earth with Neanderthals, or something. Lots of hominids! Anyway, it probably won’t catch on, is my guess.

I should point out too that there are, obviously, a lot of different things going on with the term “culture” in anthropology (and elsewhere). It’s not always taken as that overarching or emergent thing that makes people do strange things. In fact, this might even be a minority position at this point – fellow Anthros, correct me if I’m wrong!
As an example, there’s the concept of culture as a cognitive function – shared knowledge, schemas, and cognitive models. This is the approach my adviser uses – one I don’t wholly embrace. The benefit is that it doesn’t try to subsume all of human behavior and experience, plus the activities of non-humans – it would be possible to see cognitive culture as one causal force among many. I think this is very different from the old concept of culture as a sort of super-organism – which is still influential, and often used unconsciously today.

Yep, I’m pretty sure you’re right about that, Jeremy. Bounded, overarching, deterministic models of culture are very much out of style as far as I can tell.

And Levi, I’m glad those references have tickled your fancy. I am very much excited by multi-species ethnography and see it as emerging parallel to SR/OOO. I think there’s lots of room for interdisciplinary dialogue here and I’m glad it’s not just me who sees it :)

Haraway uses the term “naturecultures” — might it not be equally or more interesting to expand the notion of culture, such that it could be something possessed by nonhumans, rather than just abandoning the term? The idea of naturecultures highlights the imbrication of the material with the semiotic, whereas “hominid ecology” seems to sublate everything under the natural, though I know that’s not what you’re trying to do. It’s an aesthetic quibble, really. Enjoyed the post!

Hi Levi, I’ve been following your blog for a while now and find your work very interesting. I just wanted to raise an issue that I wondered your opinion on. It seems in your onticology and OOO and SR in general that there is a certain stylistic use of lists of nouns that are either more or less connected and end with etc.
‘Groups are also held together (and separated) by rivers, mountains, various plants and animals (cf. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel), roads, telephone lines, waste and sewage systems, mediums of communication, microbes, parks, oceans, climate regularities, etc.’
‘This would require us to discern material-semiotic components or texts, but also buildings, roads, technologies, features of the “natural geography”, the different groups, the different institutions (corporations, businesses, governmental agencies, etc), food sources, energy sources, fences, domestic and wild animal life, microbes, etc.’
I was wondering what you felt about the, maybe, arbitrary nature of these connections that could be seen as causing a violence upon the ‘being’ of these things and an off-handedness that relegates these terms to ‘the known’ rather than objects of a certain encounter?

I think Latour is right to point out that the problem with ‘social’ is when people take it to mean a kind of ‘stuff’ separate from political, economic, material, etc. He’s able to re-articulate the concept rather than dropping it once he works through its etymology and severs it from the cognitive schema of modernism, understanding it more broadly as a heterogeneous association of things. I think one could do something similar with culture.

“mid-15c., “the tilling of land,” from M.Fr. culture and directly from L. cultura “a cultivating, agriculture,” figuratively “care, culture, an honoring,” from pp. stem of colere “tend, guard, cultivate, till” (see cult). The figurative sense of “cultivation through education” is first attested c.1500. Meaning “the intellectual side of civilization” is from 1805; that of “collective customs and achievements of a people” is from 1867.”

You can see the ‘culture’ as we know it today — as a reified, macroscopic, essentialised kind of stuff — is a relatively recent invention. It’s actually something of a johnny-come-lately, etymologically. All of two hundred or so years old. We’ve largely lost the sense of culture as cultivation, as caring or honouring.

Over time it was cut down to a list of achievements of a ‘people’ or ‘civilization.’ Little more than a gaudy procession of pin-badges. It’s not hard to understand why: you can easily expropriate a noun, it’s very hard to expropriate a verb. Nouns can be imagined to just sit there, obedient and complete; verbs are implied to be ongoing, dynamic, incomplete. The former can be locked up in a safety deposit box, really or figuratively; the latter must actually be nurtured and recognised as independent things with their own needs and trajectories.

If culture becomes a fixed thing then you can easily append it to your flag and claim it as your own. This is how ‘the West’ was born; and how nations were born too — by forcibly coagulating the disparate labours of the many and several linked only by present political bonds and thus creating something like ‘English culture’ — a hotchpotch of Shakespeare, sport sandwiches; a mishmash infinitely more drab, kitsch and miserable than those things taken on their own.

Culture as culturation is precisely what is denied by that whole etymological shift and yet it is the very lifeblood of the whole affair. It’s the dirty little secret of cultural capital — that it relies on local, chaotic practices of culturation, care and tending that dedicate themselves not to profit or patriotism but simply to themselves and their particular communities.

We see this willful ignorance alive and well today in, for example, the Tory government’s plans to slash funding for the British film industry and concentrate the remaining funds on popular, mainstream film-making. Of course what every filmmaker immediately pointed out is that no one knows what will be a popular film before the fact — it’s always a gamble and sometimes the most unlikely contenders become the biggest hits. The Tories say ‘make me a blockbuster’ without understanding the whole meshwork (or ecology) of culturation necessary to produce any individual cultural artifact. Typically of rightwing politics they find one thing they like (‘popular films’) and agree to support that but refuse to support what makes that thing possible. To them culture is a product and not a process; a definite, discrete thing that can be packaged up and sold, not a mesmerising, practiced thing that can be owned by no one. (Perhaps one could say that they embrace the notion of objects but lack the concept of withdrawal!)

Of course, re-appropriation through re-articulation is only one strategy. Replacing the terms by creating new ones is an equally good strategy and I agree that ecology deserves more discursive airtime. And yet let’s not dismiss ‘culture’ too quickly. It’s history is too rich with the contradictions of modernity to lose it altogether.

Indeed, if we recognise the agricultural roots of the word it may complement ‘ecology’ quite nicely.

I preferred the opposite strategy, and talk of non-human cultures (among squirrels, especially), but our goal is more or less the same.

Oh, and I’m not sure you should use Judeo-Christian if your goal is clarity – as if Islam had nothing to do with the development of these traditions. I prefer “Abrahamic” as a collective noun, but I have more interest in religion than you.

Actually I do think nature has no contrary or that everything is natural, including those things that we normally refer to as “culture”. I see no reason to refer to beaver dams as natural and hominid skyscrapers as unnatural or culture. I write a bit about this here:

[…] is not to say that there is no relation between politics and ontology. Every political theory presupposes an ontology. A political theory makes assumptions about what entities compose a society, what their […]

[…] to produce, new associations between objects/actors that reconstruct societies/collectives/”hominid ecologes“. Must I remain, strictly speaking, within the material (is there even anything else)? I […]

[…] as this? Often the problematic fields that precipitate ethical questions consist in shifts in hominid ecologies through either the introduction of new entities in that ecology or the subtraction of entities that […]

[…] a point about inverted commas, I’m acknowledging the reality of how signifiers function in hominid ecologies. I am saying that concepts, ideas, signifiers, and ideologies are real entities and actors in the […]

[…] a good epidemology of those ideas participating in the glue that participates in cobbling together hominid ecologies, then how do we know whether our critiques and constructions are addressing anything that’s […]

[…] assemblages within which we find ourselves. What onto-cartography seeks to develop is a way of thinking ecologically about social assemblages. Ecological thinking is thinking in terms of relations between entities, investigating their […]